Cixous’ reframing : feminity, humanity and beyond

Elsa Laflamme

Cégep Gérald-Godin (Montréal, Canada)

In “Un effet d’épine rose[1]”, the preface she gave to the new edition in French of The Laugh of The Medusa[2], in 2010, Hélène Cixous recalls the “Dream of the flying pink horses” (EER, 31) (“Rêve des cheveaux volants roses”). I am proposing today to explore precisely, by an homophonic echo, the “écheveau”, the “tangle” that lies between the feminine and the question of genre, in Cixous’ oeuvre. I also want to explore the tied destiny of the human and the animal in her work, from the figure of Medusa to the ethics of the “beyond-life” (l’outre-vie), that also constitutes a politics of reading.

On a less metaphorical level, the idea behind this paper came to me by thinking about Cixous’ proposition on the feminine and femininity, while having in mind the concept of the posthuman developed by Rosi Braidotti in her book The Posthuman[3]. Reading some of Cixous’ recent texts, I had the intuition that, in some ways, she was exceeding in her writing the question of gender (genre) to move towards a definition of femininity without a genre, getting closer to a humanity conceived as a continuum – a “nature-culture continuum[4]”, which is, to summarise it, Braidotti’s proposition. This continuum will take everything in its wake, getting rid of the classical oppositions between femininity and masculinity, humanity and animality, the Self and the Other. It appears to me that Cixous’ position on the feminine and femininity, her conception of sexual difference and humanity was brought through the years to a point where she gets close to Braidotti’s view of such a continuum where “the binary opposition between the given and the constructed, is currently replaced by a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction[5]”. Posthuman theory

rejects dualism, especially the opposition nature-culture and stresses instead the self- organizing (or auto-poetic) force of living matter. The boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural have been displaced and to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances[6].

In this circle of influence, Braidotti reveals a “feminist anti-humanism” or “postmodernist feminism” that “argued that it is impossible to speak in one unified voice about women”, rejecting a “dialectical scheme of thought, where difference or otherness played a constitutive role, marking off the sexualized other (woman)[7]”. I think that, in some aspects, Cixous is embracing such a conception through the exploration of the feminine and sexual difference in her writing. As such, that will be my main argument here.

This being said, I cannot avoid or do without another vision of the posthuman or more precisely of the animal as a posthuman creature: that which raised by Jacques Derrida in “The Animal that Therefore I am (more to follow)[8]”, a lecture presented in 1997 at the Cerisy conference dedicated to the philosopher. In this text, as Marie-Louise Mallet pointed out in the “Foreword” that accompanied its re-publication, Derrida, “far from substituting for the classical opposition the confusion of a no less deceptive failure to differentiate”, “patiently multiplies the differences, bringing to our attention the fragility and porosity of the supposed frontiers of the ‘proper’ upon which we have presumed for so long to found the traditional opposition between ‘man’ and ‘animal’.”[9] His intention is to make us see and think from the perspective of the animal. To do so, Derrida asks and addresses the question of the animal; he is called one more time by the “point of view of the absolute other”, urged to think and talk by the “absolute alterity of the neighbour” when he “see[s] [him]self naked under the gaze of a cat.”[10] I will come back to this later.

To examine the ideas of the feminine and femininity in a posthuman view, I will bring to your attention two of Cixous’ texts where she expands the idea of femininity and I will situate them in the light of recent texts that approach the question of humanity. There will be three stops or stages in my reading: first, The Laugh of the Medusa[11] (Le Rire de la Méduse), published in 1975 and re-edited in 2010, then Tales of Sexual Difference[12] (Contes de la différence sexuelle), a text of 1994, and, finally, “Volées d’humanité[13]”, a text published in 2010 in Rêver croire penser. Autour d’Hélène Cixous, and not yet translated into English.

The Laugh of the Medusa

Described as “one of the most reproduced and quoted essays in feminist and gender studies[14]”, The Laugh of the Medusa is, as Marta Segarra summarises it, “a feminist manifesto, a cogent call to all women regardless of culture or situation, to realize their strength and capacity to change the world[15].” The text employs both metaphorical and political powers of the words, inviting women to write “as a woman, toward women” (LOM, 875). In that text, Cixous condemns patriarchy and capitalism, or what she designates as “biblico-capitalist society” (LOM, 886), affirming the feminine in terms of difference, and exclusively as such: “I write woman”, chants Cixous, “woman must write woman” (LOM, 877). As Segarra pointed out once more, Cixous “attacks two myths that define femininity in a negative way[16]”: “the dark continent” and the femme fatale, symbolised by Medusa. Cixous uses the figure of Medusa to get rid, once and for all, of the castration complex. She insists on Medusa’s point of view, on the laughter that she needs to free and express herself and to put an end to the ancient fatality. Here, Medusa is “beautiful and she’s laughing”. (LOM, 885)

In “Un effet d’épine rose”, Cixous returned to the Medusa, trying to recreate or to find the essence of the “spirit” that animated the writing of The Laugh of the Medusa: “It doesn’t hide, that laugh. It says amusement’s multiple nuances, abundance of ironies, of hilarities, of angers, of mocking myself and of you.” (“Revenons à l’esprit du Rire de la Méduse. Il ne se cache pas, ce rire. Il dit l’amusement aux multiples nuances, foison d’ironies, d’hilarités, de colères, de moqueries de moi-même et de toi.” [EER, 27; my translation]) The metaphorical figure of Medusa is serving two purposes, sharing these two main aims with feminism: “‘to destroy’ (the ancient oppression) and ‘to project’ (a better present and future)[17].” As an “oblique strategy[18]” to tell or to point out the truth, the laugh has been a rich way to reveal the powers of femininity and the feminine.

In this recent preface where she tries to “reframe” the reading and the reception of her text, Cixous disavowed in a way The Laugh of the Medusa. She blamed it for having gone “faster, further, stronger than” her “fictions” and plays (“La Méduse est allée beaucoup plus vite, plus loin, plus fort que mes textes de fiction et plus tard mon théâtre.” [EER, 29; my translation]. Cixous sounds as if she regrets this text that preceded her or passed her for decades – the text had even “doubled” her (“doublée” [EER, 29; my translation]). It was, as she describes it, “a daughter made in a rush who gets ahead of you and makes you late.” (“une fille faite à la va-vite qui vous dépasse et vous retarde!” [EER, 29; my translation]) If Cixous is not tender with Medusa, it can be partly because she struggled with the hazard of the translation, unhappy, to cite only one example, with what happened to the verb “voler” – in French, that verb means to steal as well as and to fly –, after moving to English language and becoming “flying” or “the art of flying”: “It’s as if my Medusa was flying with one wing, she who has so many” (“C’est comme si ma Méduse ne volait que d’une aile, elle qui en a tant.” [EER, 30; my translation]), writes Cixous in “Un effet d’épine rose”.

The feminist aura of this text does not need to be proven anymore. Serving the henceforth cliché “I want it all” on metaphorical, sexual and intellectual, artistic and psychoanalytical, political and intimate levels, all at the same time, The Laugh of the Medusa pulls its strength in exploring metaphors as the main vector of femininity. By these means, Cixous comes naturally to the question of the Other which is originally associated, in her view, with the figure of the mother. This figure, introjected by the woman, allows her to “other herself” (LOM, 882), giving her the power to constantly “relocate” herself – to use here Braidotti’s concept of “location” – and the possibility to “occur simultaneously in several places” (LOM, 882). It is not a surprise, knowing the place that the Mother, and her mother, Ève Cixous, occupied in her writing. I will comeback to this idea later in my paper.

Another reason that can explain Cixous’ displeasure about Medusa may be the fact that, quite rapidly after this text, she moved to another conception of femininity, distancing herself from essentialism to embrace the concept of sexual differences and the notion of genres. Writing from “sexual difference” to “sexual differences”, the passage from The Laugh of the Medusa to Tales of Sexual Difference acknowledges a shift, an “evolution” in the way of expressing her thoughts on “sexual difference(s)”[19]. This essay “composed in 1990, fifteen years later than [The Laugh of the Medusa], is written in another, more ponderous and philosophical manner[20]”.

Tales of Sexual Difference

Published in 1994 and “conceived as a dialogue with Jacques Derrida – who wrote the text ‘Ants’ (‘Fourmis’) in response – for a conference on ‘Reading of Sexual Difference’, held in Paris in 1990[21]”, Tales of Sexual Difference had been translated by Eric Prenowitz. The pretext of this text is a dialogue between Cixous and Derrida, but there is also another pretext and it is the publication of Circonfession[22], a text written by Derrida that Cixous will comment on in considerable detail. For the occasion, Cixous assesses that circumcision

is a theme that of infinite richness, not only for our imagination or our experiences but above all for what Jacques has done with this little piece of missing skin, stretching it like Saint Augustine’s sky-skin of which you speak, transforming it (the membrane) into a sort of immense manuscript. With this lacking membrane, something that […] is the wound, a wound from long ago. (TSD, 51)

Is it precisely this antique presence of a difference that she will follow, trying to think it also from the feminine point of view? She incidentally finds an “equivalent” to the circumcision – but an “equivalent that is not equivalent – in the presence of the menstruations, “the loss of blood” but a “loss of blood which is lived as a gain” (TSD, 53), whereas the circumcision would be a loss for a loss.

In this text, Cixous “identifies sexual difference with a ‘fairy tale’”, calling it “the difference fairy” (TSD, 48). For this reason, the reader easily supposes that the text cannot be taken “au pied de la lettre” but more as a piece of unwoven metaphors, allegories and symbols. This manière de faire surely reminds us of the tone and purpose of the Laugh of the Medusa although the political implication is a bit harder to perceive or had been relegated to a position of second importance. The tale of sexual difference inspires fear to the person telling it[23]. But it also inspired fear to the one reading it: what am I going to find that I don’t know yet about sexual difference, about sexual differences?

Bringing back some patterns from Medusa, Cixous did not avoid some of the essentialist arguments used to corroborate the vision she proposed in “The Laugh of the Medusa”. But at the same time, as Marta Segarra pointed out, in “Tales of Sexual Difference”, Cixous goes without warning from an essentialist vision to “a postmodern conception of the subject as one who is no longer conceived of as solely an individual (from latin individuus, ‘indivisible’) with definite limits that separate her from the other[24].” If it was possible to know and follow, in “The Laugh of the Medusa”, where she was coming from and going to, at least from a political angle, theoretically, here, Cixous befuddled or confused the issue. And that is precisely where, in my opinion, she meets Braidotti’s conception of the feminine, winding up the oppositions and a binary conception of the world. Cixous believes that “the subject is multiple because he is traversed by alterity and, in so being, is the very place of difference(s)[25].” As Braidotti suggests thinking it through the posthuman paradigm, Cixous “overcame the Cartesian subject and suggested a new way of conceiving it[26].” Finally, Cixous shows by the exploration of sexual difference(s) that “identities are extremely heterogeneous, in perpetual motion[27]”, and here again, she puts subjectivity in a continuum of force taking in the masculine and the feminine. And this happens, for Cixous, through the experience of writing. As Segarra finally remarked, according to Cixous, writing “enables us to modify the traditional identifications that conform to masculinity and femininity. Among its gifts we can find the power ‘to invent’ ourselves[28].”

So, what is happening in this text? What is the event happening in this text? It is, precisely, sexual difference, “the difference that passes by” (TSD, 48), S.D. (in English) or D.S. in French, homonymous of goddess in French and of a well-known French car of the fifties made by Citroen and on which Barthes wrote in Mythologies. Through this exploration of S.D., Cixous talks about something volatile and perhaps visible, just like Clarice Lispector whom she quotes, wanted to “photograph perfume” (TSD, 48). All the senses are invited and the table is set. Something will happen in the text and beyond, an encounter that will tell something about her, about him, about me, about you, about those sitting in the room, as she tells us. Because all of this is taking place in front of witnesses, without whom the thing may not happen. Or may happen as expected.

In this text, Cixous explores the question of frontiers, of limits: where are they? Are there any between masculine and feminine and how does it work? How does the idea of limits enlighten the presence (or absence) of difference when it is time to think about the sexual sphere? Regarding this possibility of drawing, in writing, by the text, “the outside of the outside from the point of view of the outside of the inside, and make the outside that is only out believe that the in is inside” (TSD, 49), the image of the feminine sex speaks for itself. After a long argument “circling” (“You advance by circles, by circling” [TSD, 49]) around the phallus and circumcision (circum- circle, -cision, to cut), after telling how Derrida excels in doing so, in cutting, in circling, in marking the difference, in differentiating and discriminating, Cixous gets there, to the site of the difference: the “heart” (TSD, 54), as she called it, combining the idea of the body and the emotions in one same image of the feminine sex, the vagina (the word is never uttered, while penis is constantly repeated). Evoking without saying it the old popular belief or adage that a man “thinks” with his sex, there is a step here before saying that a woman writes with her vagina, feels and thinks with all the richness of her “interior” (TSD, 54): “If I work with body and text, I work (from) the interior.” (TSD, 54) This essentialist conception is also reinforced by the idea that “he is truly a man, and I am truly a woman” (TSD, 58), when the time comes to talk about Derrida and her.

So she said it: there is such a thing as a difference, the difference is here and in action, or à l’oeuvre as we say in French. But we cannot see it, as we cannot see “the tree grow” (TSD, 49) or children grow while standing alongside them. Assuming that there is something such as a difference, sexual difference between the masculine and the feminine and retelling her beliefs in an essentialist opposition or difference between them, Cixous changed direction in the same stride – she owns the secret of turning off while apparently going in one direction: “I will never pass over to the other side no matter how good the approximation is.” (TSD, 57)

Cixous tells us – almost at the same time but more likely a few lines further on – that there is no such thing as difference – or a differentiated difference – because of the fluidity or the instability of the subject and of the presence of the other: “I can speak of him, of you, of her, of a she, I cannot speak about ‘myself’.” (TSD, 56) “I only know anything from experience, that is, after errors” (TSD, 57), an interior and exterior experience, that is, to say, an experience of both reality and fiction that builds me as a subject.

If Braidotti pointed out the “political economy of difference” as an obstacle to a more global vision of the posthuman she is hoping to see hatch, precisely because it leaves “entire categories of human beings as devalued and therefore disposable others[29]”, we can read Cixous’ proposal of sexual differences as a way to include and distinguish all of them at the same time. Talking from and about a “social-political scene”, Cixous stages women and men who appear, as Braidotti will say, as “ensembles that are occupied, populated, naturalized, grafted by a certain number of shares of otherness”. Cixous writes: “Our interior identifications are innumerable”, “without counting the vegetable, animal, chemical, phonic, astral elements…” (TSD, 58) Thus, the essential question of the self, for Cixous, has to be formulated as “Who are I?” (Qui sont-je?), evoking at the same time the part of the dream (by the homophonic echo of “songe”, she is asking ”who dreams?”) and the plurality of the self. As posthuman ethics “urges us to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that binds us to the multiple 'others' in a vital web of complex interrelations[30]”, Cixous invites us here to think with the categories and outside of them, with the gender to go beyond genders, with the resources of the feminine towards a femininity of a third type.